It has nothing to do with being maintained and updated, it's called a stable interface. Of course you can get OO 3 to run on an older system but it requires far more steps than just going click-click-click. Why does everyone have a hard time admitting this is a problem? Forget even comparing Linux to Windows. Both FreeBSD and OSX are much better at maintaining binary compatibility.

It's a PITA compared to Windows and OSX and there are unstable components of the system that cannot be added to the package. Ubuntu broke some statically compiled games by screwing with the sound API. What were developers supposed to do in that case? Distributing software outside the package management system is a major annoyance and has held Linux back.

Someone in this thread already pointed out how you can't install Postgresql 9 on 8.04 through the packaging system. 8.04 LTS came out in 2008. Is this acceptable to you? Requiring a major system update to install a freaking command line database program?

I didn't say the situation today is great. Only that a central package management system is better than 100 different installer and updater apps. And of course this would work better if Linux distros would provide stable interfaces but that's beside the point.

Developers could provide packages that works across diffrent versions and fix them for the changes but in most cases they leave it up to the distros to make their own packages. Hence the current situation is not because the way linux distros handle software installations.